


Thaw

by ebonynemesis



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Victor's POV, general figure skating angst, victor feels
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 08:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8572144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ebonynemesis/pseuds/ebonynemesis
Summary: It's not all "Vkusno" and katsu-don for Victor, who's trying to find something that might have been lost for too long to be retrieved. Snippets of the anime from Victor's POV.





	1. A frozen touch

It snows differently in Hasetsu, Victor thinks, sludge snow saturated with moisture that melts as it pelts to the ground, like it has difficulty forming the crispy flakes back at home. Late spring snow that manage to capture the sprinkles of sunlight, despite the overcast.

The snow bends the blossoming branches of Sakura tree with their weight. The trees shivers, and the mess of petals and slush falls from the branches sprouting green buds onto Victor’s shoulder and melts into the wool coat before Victor is able to brush it off, leaving dark patches on the material. In the distance, the snow bleaches the seaside city of colour, blurring the edges and angles that form the shapes of buildings and bridges and a castle in the distance.

_They named the onsen after their son_ , Victor bemuses, “Yu-topia” he reads, grinning when the syllables join up to makes sense in English as he speaks them into the wet fogged breath. A chime jingles as he pushes open the drapes. Beside him, Makkachin is enthusiastically shaking the wet snow out of his fur.      

The family greet Victor with the warmth of tea and bundle of towels and pajamas, still hot from laundry. He could guess which ones are the parents from the striking resemblance. He tilts his head and studies them as they take his luggage with measured and efficient steps, and no indication of recognition.

The onsen is scalding when he steps inside. It draws all the energy from Victor along with the fatigue and chill from the journey. The steam rises and envelops his face almost like an embrace. Victor sinks his body into the volcanic clay and salt scented water, until only his face remains above the surface, and watches the snow fall from the sky.

Even the snow here seems a gentle embrace, the entire city bathed by the mild ocean breeze, the bright but mellow northern sun, the pastel sakura petals.

Victor remembers the darkness that came with snow in his hometown, the winds that seemed to billow away the sunshine along with the warmth. The ice covered footpaths, opaque and uneven beneath new slippery snow that lead down to the lakeside. His mother’s hand, bony, clutching his to a point of painfulness as they skate across the uneven surface of a dark lake, their path illuminated only by the torch his mother carries.

_“Vitka, my love, I have a surprise for you.”_

His mother would hand him the torch, and show him a new step sequence, her skates carving out white “S”s and “8”s all across the dark expanse. Sometimes she’d skate so fast and so far that Victor would only be able to catch glimpses of her as she dances across the beam of the torchlight. Victor would twist the head of the torch to change the light beam’s focus, and imagine that his mother was dancing across the stage and he was holding the spotlight, trying to follow her choreography. His mother’s skates scratched loudly as she leaped, weightless, as if hoisted up by wires.

As he resurfaces Victor hears stumbling and running from inside the building, He stands up, lets the snow gently melt against his heated skin.

_“Yuuri, I have a surprise for you”_ Victor says in his mind as he holds out a hand towards Yuuri who trips out into the snow, shocked, as if he were caught in a beam of torchlight.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This Anime has taken over my mind.


	2. Gravity and Friction

 

_ 'Gravity and friction,'  _ Yakov, who was a younger man with a full head of hair, held his hand and led him onto the ice rink, ' _ You need to know them equally well in order for you to conquer the ice. Sometimes, they are your worst enemies, other times, they are your most powerful allies. Do you know how to turn them into you allies, Vitya?' _

 

He was shorter than the rink barrier at that time, nose itchy, swallowing back a cough he had developed during the train ride to St Petersburg. It was the first time he had seen an ice rink. 

 

The ice was mirror smooth and transparent. There were no shadows. And in the reflection Victor saw himself, shocked, dwarfed by expanse upon expanse of luminous whiteness. 

 

The first time he skated in the rink, he did not account for the lack of indents or unevenness, ran straight into the barrier. Sporting a bleeding nose, his arm was grabbed by Yakov, who pulled him up and dragged him to the benches, sitting him down and tilting his head up so he could dab away the blood on Victor’s face. 

 

_ 'Control, Vitya. You must learn how to control every move so gravity and friction become your friends. How does the ice stay in its solid state, how does it maintain solidity?' _

 

Victor shook his head, he was not of age for school and his mother had only taught him the most basic of arithmetic. Concepts like science and physics were as foreign to him as the white shadowless ice rinks.  __

 

Yakov pointed to the noisy box across the ice rink, where it was blowing strips of paper that waved frantically towards the rink. ' _ That is an air conditioning machine Vitya, when it is turned on, the ice stays cold, the machine takes away the energy required for the ice to melt.' _

 

Yakov put a hand on Victor’s chest, ' _ You must always stay cold Vitya, you must not let this, get in the way of this.'  _ He knocked Victor on his forehead with his knuckle. 

 

Victor was never good at following instructions, and he never managed to stay quite so rigid. 

 

Yakov wanted him to finesse his movements, he opted for bolder and more daring jumps. Yakov wanted him to focus on execution, he opted for performance heavy routines and showy costumes. Yakov warned him of the dangers of overworking, it only prompted Victor to increase the technical scores of his routines, set more rigorous exercise schemes. Yakov’s advice and plans thrown out the window as Victor opted for flexibility and sleekness instead of strength and stamina. Yakov’s then-wife, a prima ballerina, had taken one look at Victor and turned on her heels, stating that Victor did not need her tutelage. 

 

She divorced Yakov two weeks later, apparently their last fight had been about Victor. Victor had heard parts of it in the hotel room when Yakov phoned her using the hotel telephone when Victor was in the shower. 

 

_ ‘What do you mean I’m inhibiting him?’  _ The water sprayed distorted Yakov’s voice,  _ ‘I’m trying to sustain… How could you possibly know what he’s thinking about? Huh? He’s just a child, he’s got his whole career ahead of him… what does this have to do with aesthetics, you are not making sense!’ _

 

Victor draped the hotel towel over his hair and locked himself in the bathroom until Yakov screamed at him to vacate the bathroom. 

 

_ ‘I’m not ice,’ _ Victor told Yakov at their last Junior championship before his senior debut, long hair flowing down his back even though Yakov warned that it would block his vision.  _ ‘I’m colder, I know how to keep getting colder, like the currents below the surface of a winter’s lake, like the northwesterlies from the Arctic that bring the snow.’  _ He pointed at the air conditioning unit, _'I'm that.'_

 

Yakov beside him, arms crossed firmly, rigid in his chair beside Victor’s in the K&C as they watch Victor’s score on the CRT screen.  _ ‘You’ll keep draining yourself Vitya, you’re draining the energy of all that surrounds you.’ _

 

_ ‘I can’t take away gravity and friction Yakov, I’m fine as long as I have my allies.’ _

 

Yakov runs a hand down Victor’s back, across the protruding ridges of his ribcage beneath his costume. ' _Y_ _ ou are my greatest accomplishment and my biggest regret. Someday, my Vitya, you’re going to break an old man’s heart. _ ’ 

 

Yakov was unnaturally emotional during those few months before Victor's senior debut, must have been the divorce. 

 

As he walks into the ice rink, Victor catches a glimpse of Yuuri leaping into the quad Salchow, overturning, and falling, weighed down by his own self-doubt, pushed on by his own stubbornness. Yuuri gets up, only to leap, overturn, and fall again. Yuri Plisetsky punches the rink barrier in frustration, his lithe body strumming with potent, excessive aggression. He shoves Yuuri aside as he himself demonstrates the move, with sloppy free leg and a less than stable landing. 

  
He can work with excess emotion. Victor feels the pull of gravity, pulling him towards the ground from the bottom of his boots; when he lifts his feet, he tests the friction of his soles against the mats outside the ice rink. Victor is thankful for their presence. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What is even the point of writing fanfiction when YOI creators have actualised all my headcannons?! 
> 
> I bow a Japanese Dogeza to the overlords who have made this history-defining anime come true.


	3. Physicality of Music

 

He’s dreaming. 

 

_ Of the dark, of the snow, of his hometown perpetually lit by orange streetlights regardless of day or night.  _

 

_ Of his mother, her gauntness, her thin hands.  _

 

_ He reconstructed her face as he grew older, used photographs and limited memories as well as faint traces of her feature in his own when he looked in the mirror for reference. But reconstructions were just that, abstract, missing details that concreted her physicality.  _

 

_ Was her hair lighter or darker than his own? Was her eyes the same blue as his? What did her skin look like in the sun? He cannot not recall whether he had seen her in sunlight, the bright kind, like the spring sun in Hasetsu.   _

 

Yuuri bursts into his room, laptop in one hand, holding out earbuds, flushed with anticipation. It takes a whole minute for Victor to pull his conscious back into the warmth of the cosy room in this onsen inn. The music is beautiful. 

 

Yuuri’s face lights up when he sees Victor’s expression. Victor reaches out and embraces him, Yuuri’s pajamas impossibly soft in their wornness against his own bare skin. Victor tries to recall if he had ever embraced his mother like this, he must have held her at some point, when he was learning to walk or learning to skate, but he does not remember when or how he had learnt either of those things. 

 

Yuuri has gone rigid in his embrace. Makkachin wiggles out from between the two of them and jumps off the bed, happy to curve up on the stacked tatami mats in the corner of the room instead of on the now crowded bed. Victor breathes in Yuuri’s scent, hair still smelling like onsen, his pajamas tinged with the musk of sleep. Yuuri reaches for the earbuds still worn by Victor and Victor uses to opportunity to capture Yuuri’s hand, pulling until Yuuri falls in bed with him, half on top of him, the laptop a heavy weight across his hips. Yuuri tries to pull up but Victor locks an arm around Yuuri’s shoulder and presses Yuuri to his chest. Yuuri clenches his fist against Victor’s side, still rigid, Victor shrugs, settles in and closes his eyes to enjoy the music. 

 

The piece reaches a crescendo. Victor remembers the little leaps in his heartbeat when he first watched Yuuri skate, not in that video that was uploaded and shared everywhere, but during the Grand Prix last year. Yuuri was visibly shaking on the ice, Victor thought he could hear the ice’s mocking cackles beneath Yuuri’s skates. 

 

Victor had never seen someone fight so hard against the music of their program. He stumbled and almost planted his face into the ice, then struggled to catch up to the melody, and when he did, he was not in tune with it. But it wasn’t just the clumsiness that captured Victor’s attention, Victor remembered closing his eyes and opening them again and understanding the dissonance he saw before him. He was skating to another song, Victor realised, the music from the speaker systems bubbled and gurgled into cacophony like he had submerged his head underwater as Victor followed Yuuri's figure flitting across the expanse of ice. He could sense another kind of music, rhythmless melody, a tactile beat of his own blood coursing through his body, the pulse of his heartbeat, the figure in front of his eyes was matching that melody with precise and impassioned choreography. 

 

He didn’t even catch Yuuri’s name until after the free program had ended. In the rink, Yuuri bowed briefly before twisting and rushing to the K&C with his eyes staring at the floor, Yuuri’s coach running to catch up with him. Victor wanted to go and find him, tell him about the music he heard watching Yuuri skate, but he was ushered away by Yakov. Later, when he ran into Yuuri again near the exit of the Stadium, Yuuri, puffy eyes and looking like something had been sucked out of him, ran at the prospect of taking a photo with Victor.

 

He spent the rest of the year arguing with Yakov to really notice the lack of Yuuri in the competitions. He was skating a dated routine composed years ago, recycling stale choreography, and when he tries to explain the void in his chest to Yakov, he’s met with dismissal and Yakov’s disappointment. 

 

Slowly, his body began to rusted over, the years of abuse catching up once his mind loosened its grip and acknowledges the extent of the damage done on each sinew and joint of his body. After the third time he was rushed to hospital within two weeks since winning the Russian Cup, Yakov threw his hands up, pointed at Victor, who was lying in a hospital gown breathing via the oxygen mask as the doctors tried to find a unblemished patch of skin on Victor’s arms to stick in the syringe, and told Victor to do whatever the god-forsaken damned he wanted after the Worlds.     

 

Yuuri has fallen asleep in his arms, his breath tickling Victor’s chest. Victor looks down at the mop of Yuuri’s hair, so different, each strand so silky and shiny, repelling each other as they jut out in a sleep-mussed mess. Victor hears the music again, the same one he heard when he watched Yuuri for the first time at the Grand Prix last year, the same one he hears everytime he sees Yuuri get lost in the rhythm of his own motion.

  
It sounds like his own heartbeat, it sounds like his mother’s skates cutting into the ice across an uneven-surface of a frozen lake. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this before episode 10 aired with the infamous banquet scene. Decided not to change it, doesn't completely contradict the canon anyway.


End file.
